Crusader

Chapter 48

Cyrus

The world swirled about him, to and fro, and he caught glimpses of darkness and light in twain, lamps and the sun. Everything hurt from the neck down, and other times everything hurt from the neck up, but the divide was there, at the neck, and consciousness was a fleeting thing.

His mouth was dry, appallingly so, like someone had opened it and poured sand in until it ran over his lips and out, down his face and off his chest, leaving everything scratchy and dusty. He could smell old, dried blood, that more than anything, but oil was in the air, too, and fire, and other smells, familiar ones, like plants or an ointment, and moldering flesh. Faces blurred in front of him, forcing him to thrash about. He felt pressure on his arms, saw Martaina before him, and Aisling, Curatio at least once, but they were gone again a moment later.

“He has a fever,” Curatio’s disembodied head told him. The words echoed through the dark space he was in, like booming words lit out of the clouds and born on thunder.

“Searing hot to the touch,” Aisling said, but she was not disembodied at all, he could see her plainly, see her naked, her dark blue curves hidden in the shadows around him, suggestive, and he took a deep, gasping breath as he looked at her.

“Is he awake?” That was Martaina, and he saw her as well, but she was headless, just the green cloak and attire of the ranger was visible, only a flash or two of a head being where it was-where it SHOULD be, dammit. “His eyes are open.”

Cyrus could feel his eyes, too, and they were crusty, like someone had dropped stones in the corners of them, and no matter how much he blinked or rolled them, he couldn’t get them out. “… pebbles …” There was no answer from any of the three of them to that, even though it made perfect sense to him somehow, just that one word. Wasn’t it a perfect way to describe everything that was happening?

It felt like a day passed, or possibly an age, or maybe only a few minutes. It was brighter now, a lamp overhead shining. The sand was everywhere, the dust, encroaching, filling his eyes and face. It was just like the last time, exactly like it, and Cyrus was suddenly six again, and very, very far from home, if ever there had been such a thing ….

“The Arena is where you will learn to fight,” the Society of Arms Guildmaster told him, him and a half a hundred other strays and orphans, all his own age. Most were smaller than him, he thought as he looked over the crowd. A few roughly the same size. None bigger. “Where you will face your fears and put them to death. Where you will learn to serve Bellarum and the needs of war.” He was a big man, the Guildmaster, and he spoke from the far entrance. The entire thing was sand, sand around the feet, all the way to the edges. One might have expected something like the coliseum, a place he had been once with Mother, but it wasn’t; no stands around the edges for spectators, just a single, boxed enclosure where the Guildmaster stood with the other adults-a man in a white robe, and two others in armor.

“Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said, his face knit with scars on each cheek and rough skin on his forehead. He looked older than Mother, older than the man who had brought him to the Society, but beyond that, Cyrus couldn’t tell his age. “Weakness is the sum total of all your flaws, all your faults, all the things that can get you killed in battle. We purge weakness here; we don’t coddle it. If you fear something, face it down. Run it to the ground. Beat it out of you.” The Guildmaster looked them all over, and there was nary a flinch from him, though Cyrus heard the sobs from some of the others. “If you fear to be hit, then you’ll need to face it. Many of you wish to go back to your comfortable places, even if those places are the streets. You won’t find comfort here, because comfort is weakness.”

With that, the Guildmaster left the enclosure and walked into the arena; some of the crying subsided, and Cyrus could hear the soft crunch of the sand against the Guildmaster’s metal boots, his steel armor scuffed with age. Cyrus wanted to cry, could feel it, but his tears were already gone. More than half when Father died, all the rest when Mother went. He was as dry in the eyes as the arena floor, dusty but wracked with emptiness. He’d gone along when the big man-Belkan was his name-had led him here; after all, with Mother gone, what else was there?

Cyrus looked to the boy next to him, who wore rags, browned and barely covering him. It was winter now, and cold outside. How could one not be cold out on the streets, wearing something such as that? The boy’s eyes flashed at him; he was one of the ones that was Cyrus’s size, one of the very few, and his brown hair was over his eyes, long, unlike Cyrus’s short cropped bangs that barely touched his forehead where his mother kissed him every night-or had, before-

“Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said again. “It is in your nature to be weak. We will make you men-or women, as the case may be,” he said with a nod toward two girls who were in the front of the crowd of children. They weren’t crying, Cyrus thought, oddly, though he heard other girls crying among all the boys sobbing around him. “Breaking fear is nothing more than looking it in the eye and spitting in its face, finding your courage, and daring it over and over again. Pain is nothing to fear. Pain only hurts. Battle is nothing to fear, because it brings only pain. Commitment to your cause will draw out your fear, excise it, take it away. You must subsume yourself in the cause of war in the light of battle, and learn to love the draw of combat. The crack of bone and hand, the slash of sword and steel, the rending of flesh with axe, these will be your daily prayers, the things that you commit yourself to, to draw out the fear. I can make you fearless.”

The crying didn’t stop at that, it seemed to get worse, but Cyrus felt the little flecks of dust fall out of his eyes and he realized for the first time that that was what he wanted, what the Guildmaster had offered. He had cried when he had learned that Father died, cried hard, and even worse after Mother, though for a shorter time. He had stayed with the neighbors, though not for long, until Belkan had come for him. All that time he had felt the gnaw of fear, felt it chip at his bones, awaken him in the night when the tears had come, felt it eat him at him like it would someday come and take him whole, drag him off into the night where he would never be seen again.

“Who among you,” the Guildmaster said, “wants to be fearless?” The words echoed in the arena, over the sand pit, and there was silence apart from the sobs, a quiet that settled among the crying children, all so far from home, wherever that was to them.

Cyrus felt his hand go up, as though it were out of his control. It went up above the others, the first, a silent flag to mark his surrender-and his desire to be free of the fear-once and for all.